Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 73947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
“Negative. I’m closest to the spur. If Turner hits the road, we lose him.”
“Do not engage beyond containment unless fired upon,” Novak barks back.
“Copy.” I don’t tell him Turner won’t get past me because some things don’t need to go over comms.
CHAPTER 42
RHETT
I cut over on an angle, using a line Cade and I walked in the dark three days ago. There’s fallen pine, a granite shelf, a steep drop into a wash, then up the other side, where the logging spur curves around a stand of aspen.
My rifle tracks ahead of my focus as every sound separates itself into a category: distant gunfire, engine noises, branch scrape, boot impact.
The firefight continues behind me. Cade fires twice. Boone’s voice snaps over the radio, “Mouth hit. Left shoulder. Still mobile.”
For a split second, everything goes white.
Then Boone continues, sounding more irritated than afraid. “I’m mobile. Keep pushing.”
I hear Wren at the command center, my brother’s name sounding like it’s ripping from her chest.
“Mouth, status?” Novak demands.
“Bleeding under control. I’m functional.”
“You’re not the judge of that,” Novak says.
Boone laughs, but it’s breathless and filled with pain. “Tell that to my brother.”
I want to put my hands on him and assess the wound myself, because if the mission needs him, Boone will carry on with blood pouring down his arm.
But Turner’s running, and Boone is walking, so I keep moving.
“Smoke, do you have eyes on Mouth?” I ask.
“Affirm,” Cade says. “Upright. Moving like he’s pissed.”
I’m relieved until an explosion cracks across the valley less than a minute later. It’s close, and it’s followed by shouts over the DEA channel and renewed gunfire.
“Smoke?”
There’s no answer, only static. I keep moving, but terror slices into my chest.
“Smoke, status.”
Two seconds pass, then three, then Cade’s voice finally comes through, sounding rougher than before. “Smoke up. Frag threw rock. Minor shrapnel. No deep penetration.”
A fragmentation device. Fuck. My teeth lock so hard, my jaw aches.
“Location?”
“Still in position.”
It’s not the comfort it should be, because Cade could be half-dead and still insist holding position matters more than blood loss.
I reach the spur road before Turner does and find a black side-by-side tucked beneath a camouflage tarp, perfectly staged for a fast exit down a route too narrow for full-sized vehicles.
Turner planned well, but he didn’t plan for us.
I take position, rifle up, behind the engine block of a rusted, long-abandoned logging skidder beside the road.
Boots hit mud, branches snap, and Turner appears, breathing hard but not frantic. His rifle hangs across his chest, and he’s gripping the sling with one hand. There’s blood on his cheek where something grazed him.
His escorts aren’t with him. Maybe Cade got an angle after all, or maybe Alpha cut them off. Maybe Turner sacrificed them to buy himself time.
As he approaches, his eyes cut to the side-by-side, then to the narrow road, then to me, and he stops. Recognition moves across his face, but it isn’t surprise. It’s confirmation.
He knows exactly whose cabin he sent men to, exactly whose truck he disabled, and exactly whose woman he ordered his people to drag off that mountainside.
His hands rise slowly, rifle hanging from its sling as DEA agents close in behind him.
“You’re good,” Turner says, eyes on me. “Better than I expected.”
I keep my weapon trained on him. “That was your mistake.”
A faint smile touches his mouth. “Everything was running just fine until your biologist walked into my mountains.”
“They were never your mountains.”
A flash of cold anger breaks through as he sneers at me. “You could have stayed out of this.”
“You gave me no choice. You came after my family.”
Family. It’s no longer just a memory of parents we lost while we were on the other side of the world, and it’s no longer just two brothers who know me as well as I know myself. Wren’s part of that world now. She’s at the center of it.
The agents reach Turner and whatever he might have said next disappears behind the click of handcuffs. It’s a small sound, but it’s only the beginning. There are a lot more locks waiting for him.
“Turner in custody,” an agent calls, and Novak repeats it across the channel as breaking news.
The gunfire fades in staggered bursts as men shout for hands and medics. A helicopter thuds somewhere beyond the ridge.
Once Turner is searched, disarmed, and marched toward a federal vehicle, I lower my rifle and check in on comms with my brothers.
After a delay, Cade reports minor bleeding on his left arm and cheek. Boone answers my call to tell me he’s not dying, then explains his shoulder injury didn’t hit anything important because God likes him best.
When Cade answers, “Debatable,” I finally let out a breath of relief.
Novak cuts in. “All Wilder elements, report to extraction point Charlie for medical assessment. That is not a request.”
The walk back somehow feels longer than the entire operation, and by the time I reach the forward command post, the sun is fully over the ridge.